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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2016
In this thought piece, I use the recited Qurʾan as a case study for asking what it may mean to feel sound—and more specifically, “religious sound,” or sound in a religious context. A range of scholars, including myself, have asked related questions about what the recited Qurʾan sounds like, and why it may sound the way(s) it does. Here I consider the sound of the Qurʾan on the level of experience or nondiscursive meaning, asking what the recited Qurʾan feels like.
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2 Abrahams, Roger, “The Theoretical Boundaries of Performance,” in Proceedings of a Symposium on Form in Performance: Hard-Core Ethnography, ed. Herndon, Marcia and Brunyate, Roger (Austin, Tex.: Office of the College of Fine Arts, University of Texas, 1975), 18Google Scholar.
3 I considered this question with respect to the use of pitch and melody in “From Text to Sound to Perception: Modes and Relationships of Meaning in the Recited Qurʾan,” chap. 5.
4 Q 30:21.
5 The second verse of the sura is usually understood as referring to these events when it says ghulibati al-rūm (Rome was defeated).
6 ʿAbd Allah Yusuf ʿAli, The Meaning of the Holy Qurʾan, 10th ed. (Beltsville, Md.: Amana Publications, 2001), 1006–7.
7 Clarity of pronunciation and repetition of phrases is typical of the older Egyptian reciters in the murattal style, such as Husary; Minshawi also performed in the murattal style, but he is known for melodically florid mujawwad-style recitation.
8 Richard Bauman, “The Theoretical Boundaries of Performance,” in Proceedings of a Symposium on Form in Performance, 28–44.
9 Mahmood, Saba, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of ‘Ṣalāt,’” American Ethnologist 28 (2001): 827–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja, Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner, Victor Witter, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Symbol, Myth, and Ritual Series (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.
10 Mahmood, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual,” 828.
